Every time you re-compress an MP3, some audio gets thrown away. I opened a FLAC file of this song in Adobe Audition, then saved it as a 128k MP3. I then opened the MP3 I just saved, and re-saved it as a 128k MP3 with a new filename. Repeated that process 300 times.

By the 5th generation, there are noticeable artifacts in the audio quality.

By the 10th generation, it sounds like crap. And the quality only gets worse. The audio sounds progressively worse the more times it's compressed.

It's like playing the game of "Telephone" in which a large group of people line up and the first person whispers something to the second person, who whispers it to the third person and so on. By the time the message gets to the last person, the meaning would have changed.

A similar process happens when an MP3 file gets compressed over and over. Each generation introduces new artifacts in the audio as the decoder imperfectly approximates what audio was thrown away. By the 300th generation, it's hard to understand the lyrics!

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Cassettes and vinyl are cool again, so what about MiniDisc? Sony’s pint-sized digital format hit the market in 1992, but failed to make much of a splash until around a decade later.

Despite ultimately losing market shares to flash-based MP3 players, MiniDisc has seen something of a revival. Transferring music from your computer to a MiniDisc recorder is also now easier than ever.
What Is MiniDisc?

Sony came up with the MiniDisc after the Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format failed to take off with consumers. The company went head-to-head with Philips’ Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and won the initial battle (the DCC was discontinued in 1996).

MiniDisc was first conceived in the mid-1980s but wasn’t commercially available until a decade later. It took even longer for the format to see mainstream adoption outside of Japan. After Sony relaunched the format on the U.S. market in 1998, it finally became profitable around 2000.

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These are the 19 original tracks on the Auroral Chorus II CD, released in the year 2000 by Stephen P. McGreevy (www.auroralchorus.com)The natural-radio...

But first of all, why 50, or any other number? The answer can be shown in the graph below. This was produced by two researchers, Lloyd Espenscheid and Herman Affel, working for Bell Labs in 1929.

They were going to send RF signals (4 MHz) for hundred of miles carrying a thousand telephone calls. They needed a cable that would carry high voltage and high power. In the graph below, you can see the ideal rating for each. For high voltage, the perfect impedance is 60 ohms. For high power, the perfect impedance is 30 ohms.

This means, clearly, that there is NO perfect impedance to do both. What they ended up with was a compromise number, and that number was 50 ohms.

Impedance in Ohms

You will note that 50 ohms is closer to 60 than it is to 30, and that is because voltage is the factor that will kill your cable. Just ask any transmitter engineer. They talk about VSWR, voltage standing wave ratio, all the time. If their coax blows up, it is voltage that is the culprit.

So why not 60 ohms? Just look at the power handling at 60 ohms - below 50%. It is horrible! At the compromise value of 50 ohms, the power has improved a little. So 50 ohm cables are intended to be used to carry power and voltage, like the output of a transmitter. If you have a small signal, like video, or receive antenna signals, the graph above shows that the lowest loss or attenuation is 75 ohms.

Of course, you're going to say that two wires insulated from each other cannot possible be in the same place, right? Wrong! And the way to get two wires in the same place is to start with four wires spiraled together, as shown in the image below.

Blog20_How_Starquad_Works_Quad_Cross-section

If you combine the wires across from each other, you end up with a pair.

Blog20_How_Starquad_Works_Conductors_Combined

But look at that first picture of the inside of the cable and think about the electromagnetic noise. By combining the wires, you really do have the two conductors inside each other. Even if you don't believe it, the proof is in what this amazing design can do. For instance, one of the worst noise offenders is 60 Hz power (50 Hz for much of the world).

There is no shield of any kind that we can apply to a cable that has any effect on that low frequency. Even a solid steel conduit, perfectly installed, is only around 30 dB of noise rejection at 60 Hz. But starquad cable is up to 50 dB noise rejection at 60 Hz.

If I were running mic lines near power cables, I definitely would think about starquad! If I was hanging audience microphone from a lighting grid, I definitely would think about starquad.

Belden makes three sizes: Belden 1192A, full size, Belden 1172A small size, and Belden 1804A miniature. The full size is standard mic cable size. The smaller one is excellent for wiring mic booms, or places with restricted space. The miniature is like lavaliere cable.

Do you know the difference between a balanced line and an unbalanced line? If we're talking about analog audio, this difference between balanced and unbalanced is also the difference between consumer products, which are almost always unbalanced, and professional, which is almost always balanced. To go into the details of these differences would take a number of blogs, so I'm going to try and condense it here.

Balanced lines are a system that puts the audio signal on two wires. You do this by feeding the line and picking up the signal at the other end with an audio transformer. These days you can use a real wound coil of wire transformer or you can use a circuit that mimics that transformer, something called active balancing. The person who really put these active balanced circuits on the map was Greg Mackie while at Tapco, and at the company that followed, Mackie.

The reason that Mackie and many other similar companies can offer you a decent mixer for very little money is active balancing. Compared to a circuit or to a chip or two, real wound transformers are expensive and heavy, especially if their performance is any good. They are hard to make and a really good single wire-wound transformer can cost as much as a whole Mackie mixer. On the other hand, there have been lots of improvements in chip design over the years from folks like T.H.A.T. and their InGenius 1200, or the LMV831 family of chips from National Semiconductor. These chips are getting closer and closer to wire-wound real transformer performance and at a fraction of the cost.

The real secret is that a balanced line will reject electromagnetic noise (EMI, RFI) but allow the audio signal to go through. It will also reject noise from the pairs around it, like in a multi-pair snake cable or even from 50Hz or 60Hz power wiring. You absolutely must use balanced lines, if you are running any audio near lighting or power wiring.

Professional video connectors are crimped. But there's one professional connector that is still soldered, the venerable XLR. It has become the universal standard for audio wiring. It is made by many manufacturers including Neutrik, Switchcraft, Amphenol and many others. You can even find some made by ITT Canon, who invented the connector in the early 1950s. And now Belden is working on a video to show you how to solder a mic cable (or a line-level cable) into this connector and will post it as soon as it's available.

Schematic for THAT Thing, a do-it-yourself preamp/electronics project by Curt Yengst, featured in the Jan. 8, 2020 issue of Radio World.

You are invited to listen to and download Old Time Radio shows here!

Dragnet, the brainchild of Jack Webb, may very well be the most well-remembered, and the best, radio police drama series. From September, 1949 through February 1957, Dragnet's 30 minute shows, broadcast on NBC, brought to radio true police stories in a low-key, documentary style. The origins of Dragnet can be traced to a semi-documentary film, "He Walked by Night" from 1948, in which Webb had a small role. Both employed the same Los Angeles Police Department technical adviser, used actual police cases and presented the case in "just the facts" manner that became a hallmark of Dragnet.The ominous four note introduction to the brass and tympani theme music, titled Danger Ahead, is instantly recognizable as well as the shows opening narration:

"Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."

How the first moon landing was saved. The full story of the people who made Apollo 11 happen and prevented it from going badly wrong. Theme music by Hans Zimmer. Episodes released weekly.

• Updated: weekly
• Episodes available: indefinitely

The Nero Bluetooth 4.0 Audio AUX-Adapter can be used anywhere:

In the car: Plug the Nero Bluetooth 4.0 Audio AUX-Adapter into a USB power source (e.g. charger on the cigarette lighter) of your car and connect it to the AUX port of your car.

The advantage: No more annoying charging! The Nero Bluetooth 4.0 Audio AUX-Adapter is always ready for use and starts automatically when the car is started.
Smartphone: Connect your phone to the Nero Bluetooth 4.0 Audio AUX-Adapter via Bluetooth (find Nero AUX audio) and start playing your favorite music or podcast

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Adding two identical sources (doubling the signal) will increase the total signal level with 3 dB (10 log(2)).

Ten identical noise sources will increase sound level by 10dB

ARTA software uses standard and professional PC sound cards and interfaces for audio signal acquisition and generation.

The ARTA program has functions of following measurement systems:

Signal generator of following signals: white noise, pink noise, periodic white noise, periodic pink noise, speech signal, sine, two sine, multitone, triangle, square.
Impulse response measurement system
Single and Dual channel Fourier analyzer>
Spectrum, octave band and THD analyzer
Triggered storage scope